Dart (6 page)
Authors: Alice Oswald
I steer my wave-ski into caves
sealwatcher
horrible to enter alone
The fur, the hair, the fingernails, the bones.
Flick out the torch, the only thread between down here and daylight
and count five while the sea suckles and settles.
Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine.
At low water
I swim up a dog-leg bend into the cliff,
the tide slooshes me almost to the roof
and float inwards into the trembling sphere
of one freshwater drip drip drip
where my name disappears and the sea slides in to replace it.
There the musky fishy genital smell
of things not yet actual: shivering impulses, shadows, propensities,
little amorous movements, quicksilver strainings and restrainings:
each winter they gather here,
twenty seals in this room behind the sea, all swaddled
and tucked in fat, like the soul in is cylinder of flesh.
With their grandmother mouths, with their dog-soft eyes, asking
who’s this moving in the dark? Me.
This is me, anonymous, water’s soliloquy,
all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,
whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,
driving my many selves from cave to cave …
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children.
Dart
, her second collection, won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection,
Woods etc
., was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
A Sleepwalk on the Severn
appeared in 2009, as did
Weeds and Wild Flowers
, her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman.
In
the
Poetry
Firsts
collection
Simon Armitage –
Kid
Wendy Cope –
Making
Cocoa
for
Kingsley
Amis
Philip Larkin –
The
Whitsun
Weddings
Don Paterson –
Nil
Nil
Sylvia Plath –
Ariel
First published in 2002
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2010
All rights reserved
© Alice Oswald, 2002
The right of Alice Oswald to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–25942–7
